THE Arab spring has been one of the most intensely covered upheavals of recent times, with hordes of journalists descending on a succession of countries, notebook and camera in hand. Perhaps no single event in this richly inspiring news season has captured so much attention as Egypt's revolution, and in particular its culmination in the vast, happy throngs that filled Cairo's Tahrir Square last winter.

The thrall of Hosni Mubarak's dramatic exit has dissolved into a lingering, indeterminate and far less telegenic denouement. But at least the breathless eyewitness reporting can now be replaced by a more considered approach. Two highly readable books stand out from the inevitable instant accounts of Egypt's revolution. They serve not only to fill in enlightening detail, but to place the current turmoil within the broader context of Egypt's past—and to suggest what may lie in its future.

Much of the early reporting on the unrest framed the surge to oust Mr Mubarak in overly personal terms, as a specific reaction to abuses of power during his three-decade-long reign. Steven Cook, a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, takes a usefully corrective view. His book, “The Struggle For Egypt”, is a timely, well-researched and lucid political history that sweeps back to the origins of the praetorian dynasty that has ruled Egypt since the 1952 military coup.

Mr Cook shows that whereas grievances against Mr Mubarak certainly accumulated during his long tenure, and dramatically so towards its end, it was in many ways the style and shape of the state that he inherited (and did so little to change) that carried the seeds of its own destruction. The group of mid-ranking officers who overthrew King Farouk, and in so doing set an unfortunate template for other Arab revolutionaries in the 1950s and 1960s, started with no particular ideology and promised a swift return to parliamentary rule. But their ambitious leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, gained a taste for power. Within a decade he had effectively crushed all opposition. He established a range of institutions, including “state security” courts and student and trade unions infested with government spies, as well as overlapping and unaccountable security agencies and a vast state propaganda machine. All of them existed to bolster the pharaonic stature of the president.

The Nasserist structure was coup-proof and attentive to the hitherto neglected poor. It was disastrous in other ways, producing a stunted economy, a bloated bureaucracy and a sequence of military debacles. The best-known was Israel's triumph in the six-day war of 1967. But casualties from Nasser's brash military intervention in Yemen, which sapped Egypt's strength just before that fatal clash, may have equalled Egypt's losses from all its four wars against the Jewish state. Yet as Mr Cook explains, perhaps Nasser's greatest failure, along with that of his peacemaking successor, Anwar Sadat, and their stolid inheritor, Mr Mubarak, was of a more subtle nature.

“Their rhetoric about social justice, economic change and democracy never matched the everyday reality of the vast majority of Egyptians,” he writes. “What roles should Islam, nationalism, and liberalism play in Egyptian politics and society? The inability of Egypt's leaders to answer these questions in a convincing way forced them to fill the void with violence, which ultimately led to the Egyptian revolution of 2011.”

Mr Cook carries his narrative to the events of last year's upheaval and its immediate aftermath. Wisely, he refrains from predicting the outcome of Egypt's current political contest, which is pitting an amalgam of players who are oddly similar to those of the 1950s: a paranoid, military-dominated state, Islamists, liberals and anxious foreign powers. What continues, he concludes, is a struggle over Egypt's identity, and over competing legitimacies, that is likely to be long and bruising.

Ashraf Khalil, a Chicago-born Egyptian reporter who has covered the Middle East for more than a decade, provides a more intimate and chatty, but equally insightful and often humorous account of Egypt's revolution. Mr Khalil does not delve deep into Egypt's past, but deftly explains the sheer awfulness of the late Mubarak years.

The leader's greatest crime, he says in “Liberation Square”, was to treat his people with contempt, fomenting despair and self-loathing. “Hiding behind the truncheons and tear gas of the Central Security riot police was an intellectually bankrupt and cynical blank space of a regime… That's why there was a distinct undercurrent of bitterness and shame mixed in with the euphoria and the resurgent sense of empowerment coursing through the Cairo streets that February, when Mubarak meekly left the stage. The sentiment was something approaching: ‘I can't believe we let these guys run our lives for decades.' ”

But one year on, many wonder who really calls the shots. The Nasserist security state is bloodied, but it still stands.